adiant beautiful. He had forgotten what
her head, what her face offered to the sight; she was in white, there
were gold figures on her dress and her hair was a casque of gold. He saw
in a single moment that she was happy, happy with an aggressive
splendour. But she wouldn't speak to him of that, she would speak only
of himself.

"I'm so delighted; my father told me. How kind of you to come!" She
struck him as so fresh and brave, while his eyes moved over her, that he
said to himself irresistibly: "Why to him, why not to youth, to strength,
to ambition, to a future? Why, in her rich young force, to failure, to
abdication to superannuation?" In his thought at that sharp moment he
blasphemed even against all that had been left of his faith in the
peccable Master. "I'm so sorry I missed you," she went on. "My father
told me. How charming of you to have come so soon!"

"Does that surprise you?" Paul Overt asked.

"The first day? No, from you--nothing that's nice." She was interrupted
by a lady who bade her good-night, and he seemed to read that it cost her
nothing to speak to him in that tone; it was her old liberal lavish way,
with a certain added amplitude that time had brought; and if this manner
began to operate on the spot, at such a juncture in her history, perhaps
in the other days too it had meant just as little or as much--a mere
mechanical charity, with the difference now that she was satisfied, ready
to give but in want of nothing. Oh she was satisfied--and why shouldn't
she be? Why shouldn't she have been surprised at his coming the first
day--for all the good she had ever got from him? As the lady continued
to hold her attention Paul turned from her with a strange irritation in
his complicated artistic soul and a sort of disinterested disappointment.
She was so happy that it was almost stupid--a disproof of the
extraordinary intelligence he had formerly found in her. Didn't she know
how bad St. George could be, hadn't she recognised the awful thinness--?
If she didn't she was nothing, and if she did why such an insolence of
serenity? This question expired as our young man's eyes settled at last
on the genius who had advised him in a great crisis. St. George was
still before the chimney-piece, but now he was alone--fixed, waiting, as
if he meant to stop after every one--and he met the clouded gaze of the
young friend so troubled as to the degree of his right (the right his
resentment would hav